If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Adobe Open-Sources CFF Rasterizer For FreeType

05-02-2013, 12:10 PM

Phoronix: Adobe Open-Sources CFF Rasterizer For FreeType

Adobe has open-sourced their advanced CFF rasterizer for the FreeType project. This Adobe contribution, along with the support of Google, will improve FreeType font rendering on Linux and other platforms...

That's nice, considering this is one of those things many people seem to gripe about when it comes to linux. Personally I think linux renders fonts just fine, in fact on my 1080p TV, text is far more legible and less glitchy looking on linux (and mac for that matter) than it is on windows.

Comment

You should read the part that you quoted. I was replying to a post that claimed that ?many people? complain about Linux font rendering and ?many people? usually encounter TrueType fonts. PostScript fonts are usually used for print. Therefore ?many people? are not affected by that contribution.

Comment

This contribution has absolutely nothing to do with TrueType fonts normal users normally encounter.

Intersting observation. I spend a lot of time writing [fiction and technical] and read constantly. I'm not running into many well published TrueType Font works.

Of course, in a Display Postscript world of NeXT I was spoiled by the quality of display output. Tradeoffs were then made with OS X due to changing the Display engine to Display PDF and how the world became obsessed with the Web and thus cheap TrueType fonts. Yet I imagine a lot of industries will be thrilled to have quality output in the likes of Linux/FreeBSD and not be beholden to either OS X or Windows.

Fonts are far better quality in OS X, though Freetype is an excellent engine. I'm sure all the crap they've been going through working around legal issues with CFF/TrueType patents is a big sigh of relief. Application developers will be thrilled.

Comment

This contribution has absolutely nothing to do with TrueType fonts normal users normally encounter.

Yes, this rasterizer 'only' supports .otf fonts, however as far as I know pretty much all new fonts, including pretty much all the Google webfonts are available in .otf format. Also you can convert between the formats, chances are something is lost in the translation, that I am unsure of.

Overall from what I've read, otf (cff) is a superior format for font creators as it effectively passes on much of the difficulty of hinting to the rasterizer rather than having to manually embed the hinting information into the font. This new (CFF) rasterizer is already implemented in Windows font rendering engines (WPF, DirectWrite) and is afaik the rasterizer which is used in Windows phones and tablets when rendering text.

As I'm not using the Windows fonts on my machine but rather those from Webfonts including Droid Sans (my 'standard' font), Source Code Pro (my coding font) etc, and that these are all available in .otf format, I'm happy to see an improved rasterizer. Of course just because it says 'improved' doesn't mean that I will find it preferable as font rendering quality is a very subjective thing.

For example I find the Apple OSX font rendering to be 'fuzzy' but I'm certain that if I used it for a relatively long time it would look fine to me, just as nowadays if I sit down on a Windows box I think the font rendering looks off, while back when I was using Windows I thought the font rendering looked nice.